FALLBROOK CLUB BUILDS A POWERHOUSE RUGBY TEAM

Megan Pinson helps lead girls’ squad to national recognition

FALLBROOK 
Fallbrook high school senior Megan Pinson had no idea a decision she made in middle school would affect her as much as it has today, with a trip to the Olympics very much a possibility on the horizon.

It hardly looked that way just five years earlier. Pinson had been a cheerleader for most of her young life, but a middle school coach persuaded her to trade in pom-poms and tumbling for cleats, bruises and grass stains. She went out for rugby in seventh grade, and immediately fell in love with the sport because of its physical nature and team competitiveness.

“We were learning from little cards, with the coaches learning with the players,” Pinson said. “It became more than a sport. It became a community and a lifestyle, and I haven’t looked back.”

As the captain of the Fallbrook High School Girls Rugby Club, Pinson has played a critical role in building the program into a national power. The squad won the USA Rugby National Invitational Tournament held at Stanford in May, before moving on with some members of that team to take first place at the USA Sevens High School Rugby Challenge in Philadelphia.

The combined scores of both championship games was 95-13 in Fallbrook’s favor. The team absolutely dominated the competition, and with Rugby sevens being introduced at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Pinson and other members of the Fallbrook team could be South America bound four years from now.

“She’ll still be young when 2016 rolls around, but she’s that good,” Pinson’s club coach, Craig Pinnell, said when asked about Pinson’s Olympian dreams. “She showed the ability, especially in the sevens tournament, to just run over the other teams.”

Indeed, Pinson’s best attribute might be her strength, particularly in scrums from her lock position. However, she’s working on improving her speed and agility, key components of rugby sevens, a variant of the sport. Traditional rugby is played with 15 players on each side. In sevens, the sport accepted at the 2016 Summer Olympics, the number of players on each side is reduced to seven.

Sevens is still played on the same large field, opening up the game for long runs and high scoring.

“It’s a lot faster, so my goal is to be as fit as I can be to play in the Olympics,” Pinson said.

Pinson has committed to continuing her hard work between now and then, and will play rugby at defending national champion Penn State after she wraps up her upcoming senior season at Fallbrook. But back in seventh grade, playing a sport in college and possibly making a trip to the Olympics sounded as foreign to Pinson as space travel seemed to mankind in the early 20th century.

It’s remarkable how things can change so quickly in life.

“I thought I’d play rugby for a while, but had no idea that I would end up playing in college. I thought I was going to work with animals and be a trainer at SeaWorld,” Pinson said, laughing. “Rugby has changed my whole perspective of where I want to go in life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”